"Yes, mom," Hayley said, holding them up.
`A teacher's assistant opened the passenger door of Linda's car. Linda gave Hayley another quick kiss as her little girl struggled and scrambled to lift herself off the passenger seat and out onto the sidewalk. As soon as she emerged from the car, the assistant took hold of her hand and guided her toward the front door of the school. Linda crouched down and watched Hayley climb the front steps and disappear behind the glass doors, into the front lobby of the school. A honking horn startled her. Since Hayley had disappeared into the building, she had no other choice but to leave.
As her car pulled away from the school, she began to cry. And cry. Rather than a series of convulsing sobs, teardrops flooded from her eyes and splashed: onto her blouse, onto her arm, and onto her swollen belly. Linda was nearly seven months pregnant. During the last few ultrasounds and other tests she'd received, they confirmed that her second child would be a boy. Though he loved Hayley, Stephen was deliriously happy that he would soon have a son.
Linda drove aimlessly through the forested countryside surrounding their neighborhood. She was in her least favorite stage of the pregnancy, from what she remembered with Hayley.
It was way too far along to hide or even disguise, but far also from the glorious birth of her second child. For now she had to put up with the waddling, the baby pressing on her bladder, her swollen feet, and her moodiness. It might have helped if she could go back to work, to slip into the comfort of all the day-to-day details of all the patients in the unit and the new things she constantly had to learn. She'd taken that day off, however, since her daughter's first day of school was a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Linda, Stephen, and Hayley lived in a house Linda jokingly referred to as a "McMansion." It was big, with five large bedrooms, an entertainment room with a stone fireplace and a balcony, with kitchen island and stainless steel appliances, and the house had been finished in a classic, tudor style with lots of brickwork on the facades. Still, the house had a thrown-together feel about it.
Once, when Bobby came to visit them after his traumatic divorce, he found a squeaky spot on the hardwood floors near the threshold for the kitchen. He jumped back and forth on it, making the floor squeak and squawk as if he were a vaudeville performer. It squeaked like that only if you stepped hard onto a certain spot, but the noise so annoyed Stephen that he called the builder. They could fix the floor squeak, but they would have to tear apart the floor and it would cost thousands of dollars. In the end, Linda bought a nice Persian rug and placed it over the spot to help dampen the squeak.